Report's Findings Show Plight Of State's Cities

November 15, 1994|By CHRIS SHERIDAN; Courant Staff Writer

NEW HAVEN — Demographer Harold L. Hodgkinson offered endless charts and tables Monday to explain why the state's suburbs ought to aid its struggling cities, yet in the end his most compelling argument came not from a statistic -- but a story.

In winding up a presentation that covered everything from unemployment rates to teenage pregnancy numbers, the nationally recognized statistician told the tale of an affluent Detroit suburb that recently marked a tragic first -- its first drive-by shooting, committed, it so happened, by youths who traveled out from the city.

``There's no way that stuff [in cities] won't have an impact on the rest of the state,'' he said.

For Hartford, he said, ``that stuff'' includes a child poverty rate more than four times the state's average, a rate of teenage pregnancies nearly three times the state's number and a rate of ``unoccupied youths'' -- those who are not in school, working or in the armed forces -- more than double the state's figure.

Those were just a few of the statistics Hodgkinson, an author and researcher affiliated with the Institute for Educational Leadership, compiled in a more than 50-page study of the condition of the state and its major cities. He is scheduled to present his findings again in sessions in Hartford and Bridgeport today.

Released Monday, the study was supported by a grant from the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund, a New Haven-based center dedicated to improving education. The study is the first of three reports the fund expects to release over two months in a bid to inform the public and policy-makers, fund Executive Director David Nee said.

The fund also has commissioned a survey by the research group Public Agenda to learn residents' views on quality and integrated education. In addition, it has sponsored, with the Connecticut Commission on Children, a report by Fordham University on state ``social indicators.''

``Even as we have changes in political regimes . . . it's important we keep the mirror up to our faces. . . . There is no isolating ourselves from the changes in the world or in the state,'' Nee said.

Nee noted, for example, that Hodgkinson's report found the state ranked 11th in the nation in elementary school enrollment growth over the past three years, and much of that growth is among minority groups.

Between 1980 and 1990, for example, the state's total population grew less than 6 percent, but its percentage of residents who are members of minority groups climbed more than 40 percent. Nationallly, their numbers increased about 30 percent during that period.

Among Hodgkinson's other findings:

* The state may have the highest per capita income in the nation -- $23,776 -- but it is 48th in terms of getting those who lose jobs off unemployment. An unemployed worker in Connecticut in the early 1990s stayed unemployed longer than in any state other than Kentucky and West Virginia; in general the state ranked 15th in the nation in the percent of workers unemployed.

* The state's rate of growth in the past three years placed it 47th in the United States. The state is one of just three -- Massachusetts and Rhode Island are the others -- losing population so far this decade, and that decline is expected to continue in coming years.

* The state has the fourth-lowest percentage of youth comprising its population. Less than a quarter of the state's residents are under 18, ranking it behind only Florida, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

* At the same time, Hodgkinson said Monday, more recent figures show the state ranks 14th in its percentage of residents 65 and over.